Almost 70 mass unmarked child graves discovered by ITV News investigation into mother and baby homes

And the workhouses were set up themselves as a way to support the indigent.

Homepage - Foundling Museum

In societies which rejected 'fallen women', the streets and poverty and death were the likely future for them and their babies. It's hard to imagine it now, but originally the Magdalene Laundries were set up in the 18th century as 'refuges' for prostitutes who would otherwise probably have died in the gutter.
And the Mother and Baby homes were set up as more healthier and more humane alternatives to the awful workhouses.

The road to hell was paved with something resembling good intentions...

Isn't there a foundling museum in London? All the little trinkets, buttons, ribbons that the mothers left with their babies. All they could spare, to let them know they were loved, hoping they could be reunited.

Foundling hospitals had a death rate of about 50% of babies placed in their care - a huge improvement on the almost 100% death rate that the alternative arrangements offered.

This is what happened to my grandmother and father. There was certainly a lot of “shame” involved though - neither had a happy, normal life afterwards.

Lots of the time it wasn't just about 'shaming' it was about hiding the birth, having the child adopted.
Then in theory allowing the young mother to put the child behind her and get on with her life. Like nothing had happened.

My mum remembers a couple of girls / young women suddenly disappearing 'shes gone to her Aunts for a bit'
With the benefit of hindsight shes fairly sure they were actually packed of to Mother and baby homes to have babies in secret 🙊

There's a building in a town near me, now a hotel but built as a 'Ragged' school. If you look round Manchester, Salford, and probably most cities/towns that grew during Victorian times, and look up you'll see the names of former institutions. For the blind, the deaf, the destitute, mentally ill. Now repurposed or derelict. I'm sure some of them were wonderful places, refuges, but I bet others were absolute horror shows or they'd swing between depending on who was in charge. I don't know how long they stayed open but I suspect some were still going well into the 20th century.

Isn't there a foundling museum in London? All the little trinkets, buttons, ribbons that the mothers left with their babies. All they could spare, to let them know they were loved, hoping they could be reunited.

ITV have barely scratched the surface.

Cary Grant's mum was placed in an institute by his father. I think he was told she was dead? He got her out when he found out. Iirc he says he found a woman who was institutionalised but sane.

Totally agree. This was and still is- because of the effects down the generations- also an English problem.

We had all the same misogyny, racism, ableism going on and the same blame and shame approach to girls and women pregnant outside marriage from all branches of the church here.

It’s heartbreaking how these women and their babies were othered and then neglected or harmed in such recent times. People close to me have been affected by this too, so it feels very close to home.

It's tragic to find out about new examples like this of how women and children were/are treated in patriarchal societies, but perhaps revelations like this will cause people to re-think that it was only the nasty Irish and only the evil Catholics - e.g. the misleading '800 babies dumped in a septic tank' line that went around the world - who did things like this.

There is a book called The Orphanage by Frances Reilly about the physical and sexual abuse that occurred at the Nazareth House Convent in Belfast run by the Sisters of Nazareth.

My father was in one of these “homes” in England as an infant, run by the Sisters of Nazareth not the Salvation Army. He was apparently in a very poor health condition at 3 months old (described as filthy and starving in a family letter). I applied to Sisters of Nazareth for any records pertaining to him but they say they have nothing to suggest he was even there. It appears to have been a traumatising experience for both his and his mother - though she wasn’t in the home, but eventually rejoined her family after giving birth elsewhere.

Cn you imagine knowing who your child is as an adult and being hesitant to contact them?

I could not imagine NOT being hesitant to get in touch.

I think one thing we don't appreciate is how long that 'shame' lasted.

I remember reading about the author Bernard Cornwell. He traced his birth mother. When they met she said she had known who he had grown up to be because he used her surname and she had seen his picture on books, apparently he looks/looked very much like his father.

His birth mother did not get in touch because she didn't want him to think she was after something.

Cn you imagine knowing who your child is as an adult and being hesitant to contact them?

I disagree to some extent. Yes there was no state provisions prior to 1948. But the treatment of unwed mothers was about shaming women and their children. Keeping them in their place.
The Salvation Army made money from the homes. The people workkng it in where often sadists and had an opportunity to be cruel. They used their "good work" as propaganda to promote Chrisitanity and used religion to induce fear and shame.
The sending of children to the colonies was basically slave labour and increasing the number of whites in those countries.
Abhorrent.

The treatment of the mothers was shocking even given the "standards of the time". Sending children away (many whom had parents capable of looking after them) has been deemed unacceptable and led to an official apology.
There should have been more of a investigation into the institutions. As usual it's a mix between government and Christian organisations. If alive those accountable should be prosecuted if found to have broken the law. The trauma suffered is still affecting people today.

The Salvation Army’s focus was the salvation of your soul. Food etc was secondary to that which was most important - your soul. Their compassionate focus being that you didn’t suffer eternal damnation.

It is easy to criticise these organisations at the time against modern values but there wasn’t a welfare state. The state’s alternative at the time was Workhouses which though abolished in 1930 carried on under different names until the 1948 introduction of the welfare state. I imagine the Salvation Army’s offer was considerably better than entering a workhouse.

Other things to remember many families the grandparents took care of babies, raising them as their own child, and as a sibling of the young mother.

This is also why if doing family trees have an open mind about babies apparently born to 40 something parents.

I’m grateful to ITV for asking these questions. In England anyway I had no idea of the abuse and poor practice being on the same lines as the Irish scandal homes. But that was naïve, of course it was an attitude that was here too and the same religious groups were running mother and baby homes here too. There were laundries here too where you had to work right up to the birth. Babies were removed without consent, women were told if they didn’t give their baby up for adoption they’d be arrested.

The shocking thing is that it could have been different but the misogynistic patriarchy and religious power ran too deep- post war the government deliberately excluded these mother and baby homes from the new NHS instead leaving them to be run by church charities who didn’t adhere to modern standards of the day.

This would have pervaded all aspects of care and so essentially women were having home births at these places without the medical support of the day. Plus they were given as much shame as the homes could inculcate into them. The government made sure there wasn’t a welfare state to help these women live independently with their babies.

And the adoption records weren’t kept by the charities running them, they weren’t kept properly or were destroyed and what survives wont be digitised because too expensive to do. And ITV shows only so far shows people who had happy adoptions. Actually the standard of being allowed to take a baby was so low, just being married and Christian, so lots of unhappy abusive adoptions happened too. Thank god times are different in some ways now, it’s awful looking back and the effects of this punishment of girls and women and their babies go on for generations.
this blog asks good questions https://corambaaf.org.uk/real-apology-mistakes-past-must-include-action-make-sure-situation-has-really-changed-writes-ellen

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/09/forced-adoptions-time-running-out-for-uk-to-apologise

Crikey, this is an awful thing. Elswick's not far from me, I looked in the local papers and not a peep. People who say young, unemployed mothers ought to be kept in homes with no benefits need to watch the programme and have a long, hard look at themselves.

@Dutchhouse14 outcomes might be slightly worse because of who ended up there. More likely to be girls who weren’t well looked after anyway, already experiencing poor treatment due to pregnancy. Possibly an earlier attempt at a homemade abortion.

Not all of course. But I think girls in better off homes had a better set of options, even if only a hushed up adoption.

My friend's married mother had a stillbirth of a much longed for daughter. The doctor looked at her and said "What did you do to get rid of this baby?" and they took her away and had her buried in another person's grave. They knew the cemetery, but not the grave. The shame she was made to feel she passed on to her two year old son, who caused the loss by demanding to be carried. Presumably she was baptised as she had a name. That was in the early 50s. The attitude was vicious. My friend occasionally thinks of investigating the records at the hospital, whenever cases of illicit adoption scams are in the news.

Burials or cremations of still born babies was not sensitively handled until relatively recently.
Unmarked or papers graves for adults was also common practice.
But the really issue is did young mothers and their babirs die due to neglect and lack of proper medical care? The higher than average death rate strongly suggests they didn't receive the proper care and the home was negligent and cruel.
Also were the deaths and their causes accurately recorded?
It's certainly a story worth reporting and investigating. The treatment of these young women would have left them with deep psychological scars and from the report many of the children themselves were also badly impacted.
Even in the1980s unmarried mothers (always the women) were frowned upon.
My cousin had her first child when unmarried in 1983 and it caused quite a hoohah. The Catholic Church refused to baptise her baby as it was born in sin.

To be fair, such things were not limited to institutions/unmarried mothers. I had a relative who had a full term stillbirth in the 70’s. They were married, husband was at the hospital and they were comfortably off and would have happily paid for a funeral. The hospital just had a brief discussion with the husband only stating they would take care of it, and best not to talk about it with his wife as was best for moving on, obviously we know that’s not correct but it was ‘of the time’.

Decades later my relative wanted to know what had happened to her baby and investigated. It was mass cremated with others and ashes disposed of along with medical waste. That’s a baby of a married woman in a ‘nice suburb’. I knew someone else, unrelated to me, who was in a similar position socially at the time in the 70’s who also investigated their full term stillbirth birth thinking they would have been buried, and wanting to find out where and visit, who was told exactly the same. So, some of this wasn’t about stigmatised women, but was just a product of the times, it was based on practicality with no emotion.

I think many people nowadays don't realise how scandalous and shocking having a baby out of wedlock was regarded not that long ago. Sex before marriage was frowned upon in case it resulted in an unplanned baby and it's heartbreaking to think about what these mothers and their poor babies suffered as a result of society's views. Women were incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals because of unplanned pregnancies due to the thought process that you must be mad to have sex in a situation where you would become a social pariah if you had a baby.
I am old enough to remember being told that girls who had sex before marriage (or at least before getting engaged) were sluts and whores and unmarried mothers were treated very differently to married mothers in maternity wards.
I must admit that I see all the threads on Mumsnet about women planning babies with their boyfriends and partners who they are not married to and it makes me think how dramatically things have changed from forty years ago when I was pregnant.